Speaker verification or speaker authentication (also known as voice biometrics) is a binary classification task that consists of either accepting or rejecting an identity claim of a speaker by using some salient characteristics inherent in his/her voice. A speaker verification system can be limited by many factors. In particular, inter and intra-speaker variability as well as channel effects have been shown to strongly affect the accuracy of speech verification systems. In addition, duration constraints on both the enrollment and test speech material are usually required for ergonomic use in realistic applications. Unfortunately, state-of-the-art speaker recognition engines, which have proven their efficacy in unconstrained situations, reveal limitations when dealing with speech utterances shorter than ten seconds. Performance of automatic authentication engines also suffers from genuine imposture. For the case of voice biometric, this mainly consists of playing back a recording acquired from the client without his/her knowledge.
Thus, what is needed is a system and method for speaker verification that overcomes these drawbacks of prior embodiments. Furthermore, other desirable features and characteristics will become apparent from the subsequent detailed description and the appended claims, taken in conjunction with the accompanying drawings and this background of the disclosure.